Question: What are the technological trends that PLM users and vendors are going to have to get to grips with?
Göbel: In the future, smart product systems with integrated services that are very closely networked and form part of other systems (systems of systems) will play a much more central role in product lifecycle management. The end-to-end implementation of PLM concepts throughout the entire product lifecycle will, on the one hand, be made possible for the first time by this networking capability and, on the other, is also urgently required – for example in order to permit the integrated management of digital product twins. PLM is therefore a vital underpinning for the lifecycle of smart products. However, PLM will have to open out and develop in different directions if it is to achieve this aim. This applies, for example, to the integration of other specialist disciplines in the very early systems engineering phases, the inclusion of product instances in later product utilization phases, and the use of AI for the purposes of “engineering intelligence”.

Question: Where do you see the greatest obstacles to the implementation and optimization of PLM applications in industry?

Göbel: Many of the obstacles hindering PLM implementation continue to be of an organizational nature or relate to the field of project or acceptance management. At the same time, however, increasing functional scope and, most importantly, integration capabilities, are making the implementation of PLM solutions even more complex. We will need new skills that include the digitalization of the products themselves and combine this with the digitalization of the processes in the product lifecycle. However, the progress of PLM implementation is being helped by industry’s increasing awareness of the correlation between standard PLM tasks and the success of digital transformation in the engineering field, as well as throughout the entire product lifecycle.

Question: Do companies have the necessary technical PLM skills, for example in order to develop smart products and services?

Göbel: Far from it! The offering of smart products and services is directly linked to the enterprise-specific design of new business models and flexible collaboration models. At this level, it will be necessary to create PLM interfaces and extensions that reach through to the very early innovation and product planning processes. This will require a fundamental mind shift in individual specialist departments as well as in PLM and IT departments. Another current challenge, in particular in large companies, is the PLM-specific integration of and cooperation between somewhat traditional company departments and highly agile start-up divisions.

Question: What role do currently hyped-up topics such as the digital thread and the digital twin play with regard to the strategic importance of PLM in companies?

Göbel: Generally speaking, it can be seen that companies have recognized that PLM is key and forms a vital basis for these issues. That is why it is often becoming the focus of strategic enterprise initiatives to a much greater extent than before and is being considered from a number of very new perspectives. However, to avoid false expectations and unrealistic ideas of the potential benefits, we need to be clear about what these terms mean and consider them against the background of concrete application scenarios, that is to say not as an end in themselves. At the VPE, we have already shown that this is possible in a number of research projects, e.g. in the case of the use of digital product twins for service-based business models in the agricultural machinery and automotive industries.

Question: It is said that monolithic PLM systems are no longer in fashion. However, PLM vendors are constantly extending their solutions with new modules. Isn’t that a contradiction?
Göbel: PLM solutions must continue to develop radically at both the functional and technological levels if they are to keep up with the fast-moving dynamics that characterize products and business models. In this context, the integrative nature of PLM is of particular importance. It is becoming increasingly important that other discipline-specific IT systems and platforms be integrated quickly and easily throughout the entire product lifecycle, including for temporary applications. It is therefore vital for success that PLM vendors keep their promises regarding openness and press ahead even further in this direction, including in joint initiatives such as the prostep ivip Association’s Code of PLM Openness (CPO).

Question: You wrote your doctoral thesis on the harmonization of hybrid PLM environments. Has industry made progress in this area on recent years?

Göbel: Yes, it has been pleasing to see the visible progress and success achieved in the field of PLM harmonization in recent years. Businesses have learned from the past and pursued more methodical approaches that consider processes, methods, IT systems and company organization more holistically. However, this topic is still extremely relevant today. Here, too, technological further developments and additional PLM requirements are demanding new approaches, for example the use of semantic technologies for linking data; in this context, we refer to this as semantic PLM.

Question: Do we maybe need something like a meta-PLM system that links together the data from the different data silos?

Göbel: In principle, yes. But it mustn’t be rigid. Any such meta-PLM will have to keep pace with the ever faster dynamics of internal organizational structures and value-added networks. For example, in the AKKORD project, which was recently launched by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), we are working together with various industries to achieve intelligent data networking in the product lifecycle. In this project, we are attempting to flexibly integrate not only PLM but also ERP, CRM and other systems and perform AI-based product data analysis, for example in order to exclude possible sources of error and predict costs on the basis of quality data as early as the development phase.

Question: No other organization is working harder to further develop the PLM concept in the direction of SysLM than the VPE Institute. With which of these terms do you identify most?

Göbel: For me, the content that stands behind the terms is more important than the terms themselves, which in any case are not used uniformly. We will orient the development of PLM in the direction of the aspects we have discussed – and in some areas will have to completely rethink it. The concept of SysLM primarily reflects the idea of an interdisciplinary systems approach, which is increasing taking the place of our traditional product concept. As such, this term represents an important element of these further developments. However, it is not the only direction of PLM development that we are working on.

Question: In the future, where will you place the emphasis in terms of research and teaching? Is MBSE still at the very top of the curriculum?

Göbel: MBSE continues to be our central topic, in particular as an “enabler” for smart engineering. For example, we are currently taking part in a large interdisciplinary research project involving the knowledge-based roadmapping and cross-value chain modeling of overall system architectures in very early innovation phases in the automotive industry. A few weeks ago, we became one of the first German university research institutes to be included in the OMG’s SysML v2 Submission Team (SST), where we will help design the next SysML generation. We are currently incorporating the results of our research activities in a new cross-discipline “Smart Systems Engineering” study module which we, together with colleagues from the IT and Electronic Engineering departments, will offer in the upcoming winter semester. We opened the e4lab (engineering 4.0 lab) demonstration and testing laboratory in Kaiserslautern last July with the aim of making the potential applications of our research results tangible and accessible for industrial enterprises. These are just a few examples – many more will follow. Be ready to be surprised!

Question: The digitized engineering conference SYSLM2019 will be held in Kaiserslautern in October. Why has the name of this event been changed?

Göbel: We at the VPE have been working on the digitalization of engineering ever since the institute was founded by Professor Dankwort in 1994, that is to say for 25 years. I think that the name very accurately expresses this overarching core idea and also emphasizes the key topics we are addressing today. In the future, we want to direct even greater attention forward towards visionary ideas and trends that are also of relevance to industry in order to provide a guide for participants and stimulate an inspirational dialog about the future of digital engineering. I am very much looking forward to this year’s program, which contains some top-quality contributions, including the participation of PROSTEP AG, and is therefore ideal for promoting just such a dialog.

Mr. Göbel, thank you very much for talking to me.
(This interview was conducted by Michael Wendenburg)

The cross-departmental processes involved in handling customer orders are time-consuming and tie up significant capacities because the support provided by software applications is not optimal. The measure of all things is currently the ERP system. There is no independent PLM system, just a module integrated in the ERP system that manages the authoring systems’ CAD objects and data. “The ERP system also manages the order-neutral variant BOMs. This means that we have to check any number of dependencies every time there is a change,” explains Röhm. “Once we’ve got the BOM for the order, our processes work very well. However, the administrative effort required to create an order-specific BOM is huge because we force our designers to follow the production and assembly-oriented logic of the ERP processes. To speed up development, we are thinking about how we can decouple the development process more thoroughly from the downstream processes.” The aim is to speed up the offer and order process and to bring a new machine onto the market every year rather than every other year.

Analyzing the information flow

In 2018, as a first step, Theegarten-Pactec called in external consultants to shed some light on the shortcomings in the process and IT landscape. The Institute for Industrial Management (FIR) performed a detailed examination of the ERP-related processes, while the PLM consulting and software company PROSTEP took a close look at the PLM processes. “We weren’t thinking in terms of lofty Industry 4.0 issues but about how to better organize the existing processes involving our ERP system, as well as about topics such as variant and BOM management, how to cut down the administrative overhead for our design engineers, and how to make the knowledge we have about our machines more readily available,” emphasizes Röhm.

The consultants came to the conclusion that the interaction between ERP and PLM needed to be reorganized and that it was essential to implement clear-cut PLM processes with system support. “The highest priority, however, is to construct a PLM landscape that will make the existing information and information flows more transparent. We have placed the focus on PLM and on integrating this approach throughout the company in order to create a shared data store for all our processes,” explains Dr. Dirk Hagen Winter, project manager Change Management in corporate management.

Before starting to look for a suitable PLM solution, Theegarten-Pactec commissioned the PLM experts to undertake an initial subproject with representatives from all the affected departments in order to set up an end-to-end information model. To do this, PROSTEP used a standardized method that makes it possible to identify redundancies, bottlenecks and discontinuities in the information flows. This showed that the main problem facing the company lies in making the comprehensive know-how that it has acquired over the years available and searchable quickly enough. Indeed, knowledge is often concentrated in individual employees and is not universally accessible.

Potential in variant management

“Together with PROSTEP, we also took a close look at how we get the information we receive from the customer when an order is placed in a well-structured manner in the order processing process,” says Winter. In principle, the aim is to structure the customer requirements functionally and to transfer the configuration with the desired options at least in part automatically into the mechatronic parts list and CAD structures. The idea is to manage the variant parts list in PLM in the future and then transfer the configured design parts list to an assembly-oriented production parts list and transfer it to the ERP system.

For historical reasons, the company’s product and module structure tended to be assembly-oriented in the past. As a result, the entire company is obliged to think assembly-oriented. The Engineering department does not develop end-to-end in a functional-oriented way, but instead develops the modules in the way they will subsequently be assembled. “Of course we still need an assembly-oriented BOM, but nowadays it really ought to be possible to derive it as a second mapping from a functional view.” As Röhm goes on to say: “PROSTEP has made it clear to us that our current approach wastes a lot of potential in development.”

In addition, it is currently very difficult for Theegarten-Pactec to track the lifecycle of its machines once they have left the factory. There is no time-based view of the shipped machines in the form of an “as-maintained” view of the digital twin. Such a view, however, is also difficult to maintain, since, for example, a food manufacturer with 100 machines in different development and delivery stages does not necessarily inform Theegarten-Pactec which spare part he has just ordered for which machine or which modifications he has made himself.

Concept for the PLM system development

In a second subproject with PROSTEP, employees from the various departments examined the question of what neutral formats could be used to provide information in the future. In this context, the topic of product manufacturing information (PMI) associated with CAD objects played just as much of a role as the derivation of simplified geometry models for creating electronic spare parts catalogs or project planning. “Our vision for the future is that all the information will be available in the 3D model, which is not the case at present,” says Röhm. With the exception of NC programming for mechanical machining and sheet metal working operations, which is performed on the basis of CAD models, the processes used for manufacturing and assembly are predominantly drawing-based. The tasks of deriving and preparing these drawings takes up a lot of the company’s design engineering capacity.

In a third subproject, which is due to be completed by the end of the year, a concept for the structure of the future PLM system and a requirements specification for the selection of the system will be drawn up. A key component of the development plan is a central integration platform that will act as an intermediate layer permitting the more flexible interconnection of the ERP, PLM and authoring systems. As Röhm explains: “At present, the direct connection between the PDM module and the ERP system means that we have to update the CAx systems whenever there is an ERP system release change and vice versa. We want to decouple these components by means of the integration layer in order, among other things, to make it easier to replace certain software modules.”

PROSTEP’s experts will also help Theegarten-Pactec select an appropriate system. Röhm is extremely happy with the way the PLM consulting and software company is planning and conducting the projects. “PROSTEP understands the path ahead very clearly. However, we don’t want to merely follow blindly but instead want to work on this task together.” Those involved know very well that it will take several years to implement the initiated changes and that systematic implementation of the PLM approach will demand a realignment of the currently employed ERP applications and the relevant processes.